Biography

Charlie Savage

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times and a contributor to MSNBC. He specializes in national security and legal policy issues.

Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School. He began his reporting career at the Miami Herald in 1999, moved to the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe in 2003, and then to the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 2008.

Savage’s first book, Takeover (2007), is an investigative chronicle of the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power after the 9/11 attacks and argues that the agenda traces back to Dick Cheney’s experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations amid the fall of the so-called imperial presidency amid Watergate, Vietnam, and the Church Committee investigation. His second book, Power Wars (2015), is an investigative history of national-security legal policy during the Obama administration and analyzes the claim that Barack Obama, defying expectations, often ended up “acting like Bush” on counterterrorism and other security-related matters.

A member of the steering committee for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Savage has also been a Knight Foundation journalism fellow at Yale; a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and a Salzburg Global Seminar faculty fellow. He has twice co-taught a seminar on national security and the Constitution at Georgetown University.

Savage was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2007. His other journalism honors include the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation’s Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency; the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; and the Constitution Project’s Award for Constitutional Commentary.

He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Luiza Ch. Savage, executive director for Canada at POLITICO, and their children, Will and Peter.